How technology is a threat to the truth

Copyright: bowie15 / 123RF Stock Photo

On Tuesday, America will vote for its next president. If that election was held in my Facebook feed, I’m not sure that Donald Trump would get a single vote. It’s an absolute echo chamber.

(Stick with me here; this isn’t just another op-ed whining about social media echo chambers, I promise.)

I’m not alone, and this isn’t just an American problem. Studies like this one have demonstrated quantitatively that on social media, users tend to promote their favored narrative on divisive issues, and then form polarized groups. Within these social groups, constant sharing of information that supports the preferred narrative drives rampant confirmation bias, leading people to ignore or dismiss alternative viewpoints and refutations of their preferred narrative – even if those refutations are legitimate.

And it’s not just social media. With the rise of internet media, everyone is free to pick and choose news sources that provide exactly the kind of news they want to read. The result, critics have suggested, is that different political factions are working with different realities. This has been clearly evident in this year’s American presidential election; the two sides don’t just disagree on the issues anymore, they disagree on the facts. They disagree on reality.

It’s about to get much worse

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.

If you think this polarization of reality is bad now, you’d better strap in. Technological innovation is going to make it much worse by facilitating the manufacture of alternate realities.

Consider: the internet already does an incredibly efficient job of spreading fake news to receptive audiences. And the more “evidence” there is to support that fake news, the stronger a hold it has. For example, in the US, Trump supporters have clung to the story that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton wore an earpiece during various events (she didn’t) because of several photographs that have been widely circulated.

Photographs can be photoshopped, so when they’re presented as evidence, they must be scrutinized carefully. The best photoshops are indistinguishable from real photos for nearly everyone – trained pros might be able to spot the differences, but most of the public will fall for the forgery easily.

Now, that same technology is coming to both video and audio.

With video, for example, there’s Face2Face, the work of some German researchers, which allows for very realistic facial expression replacement in real time.

On the audio side, there’s technology like “Project VoCo,” a new audio-editing feature Adobe is working on that can synthesize a realistic recording of any human voice saying anything you want. You just give it a source recording of 20-plus minutes of the person’s speech, and then type what you’d like that person’s voice to say. “The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words,” Adobe said in a statement.

Pick your reality